Interesting. We were contacted by phone; someone actually called our number and asked if we were interested in becoming a Nielsen family.
This was in Minneapolis/St Paul, quite a large market, but we didn’t get a box, just the paper logbook. (This was in '77 or '78.)
Did the diaries for a week, twice, about a year apart each time, around a decade ago.
It was a pain in the tookus, we had probably 7 hooked up TV’s in the house at the time, and you’re supposed to keep a separate diary for each TV, yet they only sent ONE fuckin diary. In the days before all this look at me, I “cut the cord” stuff, what household had only one TV? So we had to go make photocopies of the thing, annoying. But we got a whole five bucks out of it (total, not per person…)
I got a logbook and some cash (either a dollar or a fiver) in the mail. I took the cash and threw the rest away. My parents did it for a while- they had a box connected to each TV set and were told not to let company know they were a Nielsen family.
We were a Nielsen family in the 1970s, when you wrote down everything you watched in a log book. We didn’t have cable, and it was summer reruns on regular TV, so we legitimately did watch mostly PBS that week. I wonder if they thought we lied. I was a weird kid whose favorite show was Masterpiece Theater from the time I was about 9 until Alastair Cooke left. Now, I did catch reruns of One Day at a Time in the afternoons, and monster movies late at night, but I also stayed up to watch just about any movie made in the 30s or 40s.
I suppose my brother’s constant reruns of The Monkees and *Gilligan’s Island *made up for all the PBS.
They paid us after we turned in our booklets. We went out for ice cream.
I have to wonder if the Nielsen company actually does anything with the data from those log books. Who enters that data? I worked for a company that received customer Communications on pre printed cards and the cards, if anything, only were sorted by product type and then filed away. One time I was asked to count the cards to determine which products received the most comments. Once again the comments weren’t important. I learned that I could count the cards by weighing them and that was enough to get an accurate count.
Their business is collecting data and then selling that data, but it is that data even trustworthy?
We were, back in the mid 80’s. 1986 I think. Not much TV got watched, but we dutifully filled out the diary when we did.
I know this is a year old, but I didn’t see any need to start a new thread.
My family did this for a couple of weeks like 20 years ago. It was the journal, and it was kind of annoying.
But Nielsen has recently been bothering me for a while to be part of their program, and I agreed to participate just yesterday. They had sent me a short survey a couple of months ago with 2 crisp $1 bills in it (apparently I can be bought off cheap ;)). I filled it out, sent it back, and they sent me another $5. Then they started calling. I ignored them for a while but I answered them yesterday (they sure don’t give up!) and they explained the whole process to me and it sounded fine.
They are going to send my wife and I devices to carry on or near ourselves at all times for the next 3 months, at the least. We haven’t gotten them yet but the man on the phone said it’s like a small beeper, and it detects an embedded signal in the audio of all live broadcasts, be it TV or radio (I was curious and I asked how it works). They promised me, repeatedly and unsolicited, that this device does not monitor or record anything besides this signal. No journal keeping necessary. They’re going to send us each $10 a month, plus another $50 after the 3rd month.
I’m not sure how much help we’re going to be, my wife and I almost never watch live TV or listen to the radio, except maybe NPR. But I suppose negative data is still data.
If anyone is curious and has any questions, I’ll do my best to answer. We’re supposed to get all this stuff early next week.
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I was in the Internet branch of Nielsen for a while in the '90s. Had a little Windows app that tracked my web browsing and they periodically sent $50 savings bonds. I think the bonds got lost when I moved.
That was us. In the 70s, we filled out a log book. My mother told me I had to tell her any time I watched TV. We had one set, and an aerial, and got 7 channels, so we didn’t watch that much. My parents were PBS junkies, and I think it was when one of the Upstairs, Downstairs series was on, which was something I actually liked, in spite of being pretty young. My brother was really little-- not reading yet-- so he watched the whole Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, Electric Company line-up. We must have looked pretty pretentious, but when you don’t have cable, you watch PBS.
We just did it for two weeks.
Sometime in the 1990s, I got a survey about what shows I watched from the Nielsen people, but it was just a couple of pages long, and a one-time thing. I think it was less about logging what I watched for the Nielsen stats, than looking to see if the Nielsen stats affected what people chose to watch. You know, if something cracked the top twenty its first week, was it likely to do even better the second week because people knew it had cracked the top 20.
Many times. Never a box, but journals. $5 for journaling, $2 for surveys.
What I find especially weird is that we filled out a survey explaining that we ditched satellite, would not get cable, and with an antenna only occasionally get 14 channels, 6 of which are PBS. We don’t watch TV, we stream things online. We had written some very scathing comments about the bad quality of TV and the tyranny of pay TV forcing you to pay for channels you hate. Despite that survey, we keep getting the journals to log our TV watching. My husband will turn on the TV during that week to look for anything he wants to support. Usually only weather and Britcoms on PBS.
We were a Nielsen somewhere back in the mid 80’s or so. Our young kids kept us from watching much TV, but filled the diary out anyway. At least two entries, maybe three.
Hmm, I’m getting a strange deja vu sensation . . .
Oh well.
My family was for two years straight. We had the box and it wasn’t too bad. At the worst, they would come in a hardwire sensors to the TV, DVD player and cable box. Anything they broke they had to replace (happened a couple times. Once they broke something, the second time the device was not compatible with a new sensor, so they bought us a new DVD player that would work :-)). They had trouble finding families that fit their criteria in our area so we were asked to stay on after our first year. All in all the box was not much trouble, just one more button to push when turning on something to watch.
So we got our box from Nielsen today. I don’t know where they ship them from but I talked to the guy on the phone just about 24 hours ago, he said it would ship this morning and it arrived this afternoon.
The box contained 2 each of a beeper-sized meter, a charger, a beacon so they can differentiate readings from in the house from readings elsewhere, a packet of info, and a $10 bill. All we have to do is wear the thing around for next [indefinite period]. Definitely going to be at least 3 months, could be a year or longer. They’ll pay us $10 a month, each, then $50 after 90 days and another $50 after 12 months. There are bonuses depending on how long the meter is active each day, based on a points system. Seems simple enough.